It began with a smell. Kerri Duntley had just bought a pair of large, cream-colored couches. Pregnant with her third child, she was excited to furnish her new house, a five-bedroom near Charlotte, North Carolina. But she was concerned about something wafting from the couches, which she described as "a strong chemical smell.”

Duntley had reason to be concerned. Years before, while pregnant with her first child, she began reading about environmental pollutants—those in our air, and those that creep out of consumer goods and into our bodies. Meanwhile, her family suffered from one health ailment after another. Her daughter was diagnosed with autoimmune and thyroid disorders, as was her husband. In 2010, Duntley herself was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

As the scent continued to fill her living room, Duntley asked herself a troubling question: What was causing the couches to smell like industrial chemicals? The answers weren’t easy to find. Duntley searched in web forums and even tried contacting the couches’ manufacturer. “I called and called and called,” she said. “They just would not give me the information.” She grew frustrated and began looking for new couches. It was then that she discovered an unusual service run by a Duke University lab.

The lab’s offer was simple. First, the lab instructed, wield a pair of scissors. Grab something made with polyurethane foam—say, a mattress or the innards of a couch cushion. Cut a small chunk from the foam. Wrap the surgical work in tinfoil, ziplock seal it and mail the crime-scene-looking evidence off to Durham, North Carolina. Wait up to 45 days, the lab said, and it’ll arrive: a report detailing toxic flame retardants embedded in the foam.

Duntley complied. When the results came back, she learned that her couch sample had tested positive for two flame retardants, including one that has proven harmful in animal studies, a finding that she called heartbreaking. Her experience points to a vast gap in safety information about consumer goods. With the U.S. government’s limited power to regulate chemicals, many consumers, like Duntley, are left to piece together their own crude health-risk assessments. That fabric softener? It may smell like the Elysian Fields, but what if its unlisted ingredients cause cancer? And what about that reusable water bottle? It says BPA-free, but what, really, is it made of?

Some of the chemicals were carcinogens. Others were from a chemical class that has been linked to lower IQ scores, ADHD, and thyroid disorders.

At the same time, the foam samples have given Duke’s team a large bank of crowdsourced research. By offering a free service to an anxious public, Duke’s scientists are gaining a clearer view of chemical manufacturing. And they’re learning just how much we don’t know about the chemicals that enter our homes.

* * *

Heather Stapleton is no stranger to flame retardants, a class of chemicals that limit fires in consumer products but which have been linked to cancer and neurological disorders. Stapleton, the environmental chemist who supervises Duke’s lab, first studied flame retardants while working on her dissertation, which focused on the chemicals’ presence in Lake Michigan’s aquatic life. As a postdoc, she turned toward the terrestrial world. Stapleton was part of a scientific cohort that found ingesting dust—say, getting our dusty hands on a burger—is by far our largest source of exposure to flame retardants; flame retardants aren’t chemically bound to their products, and so they attach themselves to airborne dust.

Still, Stapleton hadn’t yet focused directly on consumer products. That changed in 2008, alongside a major change in her life. “When I was pregnant with my first child, I started realizing that a lot of baby products in particular had a label on them indicating that they met a flammability standard for residential furniture, through the state of California,” she said.

The 1975 California standard, Technical Bulletin 117, was a regulation stemming from good intentions. By the early 1970s, roughly 12,000 Americans died each year from household fires, many of which were ignited by cigarettes. If the state government couldn’t stop people from smoking, it could at least fireproof smokers’ furniture. TB 117 required upholstered furniture to withstand a small flame for 12 seconds with limited damage. But that’s a lofty feat for polyurethane foam, a highly combustible material used in car seats, couch cushions, and mattresses, among other products. To meet the standard, manufacturers added chemical flame retardants to their products.

But what began in California soon became a de facto national standard, since furniture companies didn’t want to manufacture separate lines. Stapleton was interested to see how chemically saturated our furniture really is. So she and her colleagues asked families for samples of their baby products’ foam. After reviewing 101 samples from across thirteen states, Stapleton’s 2011 study reached a startling conclusion: Flame retardants accounted for about 5 percent of the products’ weight, and the chemicals were found in 80 percent of the samples.

Stapleton’s findings gained national media attention, and soon her inbox grew crowded. “We were receiving lots of requests from the general public about, ‘What should I buy? I’m pregnant, I have this baby, I don’t want to have these chemicals in my products,’” she said.

The lab offered to test some of these strangers’ furniture for free. But the requests kept coming. That’s when Stapleton and her colleagues decided to expand the scope of the testing and conceived of a free service for the public. They’d test anyone’s polyurethane foam for a suite of seven common flame retardants as something of a public service, since it would be funded by a federal grant (itself funded by taxpayer dollars).

The service would also aid Stapleton’s research, offering a valuable stream of crowdsourced data about the chemicals used in furniture.

“Saying to anyone, ‘Send me your sample and I’ll tell you what it is’—I don’t know of anyone else who does it,” said Linda Birnbaum, the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which funds the lab. Birnbaum said she believes that consumers are hungry for this sort of information. Since February, Stapleton’s group has been sampling up to 50 pieces of foam each month. Hundreds of people have submitted samples, and at times, demand has been so overwhelming that the lab has shut down its website.

“If you’re dealing with something like a mattress or a camping tent or a TV, you’re not told what it’s made of,” Birnbaum said. “And I think that many consumers would like to be able have that information readily available, and then they can make their own decision [on] whether this is something that they want.”

By crowdsourcing her research, Stapleton has also uncovered a flame retardant that academic literature has yet to identify. The flame retardant is a chlorinated organophosphate, like TDCPP, and its health effects are unknown, she said. Stapleton said that this recent discovery-by-accident followed the same pattern as her research on Firemaster 550, a popular flame retardant that replaced two widespread PBDEs after they were withdrawn from the market.

Firemaster 550’s manufacturer, Great Lakes Solutions, maintains that its newer flame retardants are less of a problem for human health. Marshall Moore, Great Lakes’ director of innovation and sustainability, said that the large majority of health research focuses on flame retardants that were withdrawn from the market about a decade ago. The research, he said, “is really not representative of the flame retardants that are on the market today.”

How is a quasi-DIY service one of the few free options for consumers who want to know what’s in their furniture? And why is it that researchers like Stapleton stumble upon new chemicals, only to find evidence of their harm years after the chemicals have entered millions of homes? But the real problem is beyond flame retardants. As Stapleton put it, “We need more critical evaluation of chemicals before they go onto market.”

"If you’re dealing with something like a mattress or a camping tent or a TV, you’re not told what it’s made of."

That sort of evaluation is currently the province of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the 1976 federal law that governs commercial chemicals. (Not including pesticides and pharmaceuticals.) TSCA’s many critics say the law cripples the government’s power to regulate chemicals. If a manufacturer wants to bring a new chemical to market, for example, it has few requirements to prove that the chemical is safe. Instead, the responsibility belongs to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to Jim Jones, EPA’s assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. “The burden is pretty much on us to figure out if there’s an issue, which is not true for drugs in the United States, it’s not true for pesticides in the United States,” he said.

Under TSCA, manufacturers can also request that the EPA keep secret a broad array of information about their chemicals, in order to protect themselves from their competition. That, coupled with the EPA’s weak ability to demand data, has left consumers with a limited view of the chemicals that enter the market.

California recently updated TB 117, in order to require fewer flame retardants in furniture. But gauging the response to California’s new mandate remains an imprecise science, since no one is tracking every manufacturer’s use of flame retardants, Stapleton said.

With elections looming and Congress divided, TSCA is unlikely to receive an overhaul this year, despite pleas from both public health advocates and the chemicals industry. Even after November’s elections, TSCA reform may remain elusive. “We’re at a period when we’re not passing any major laws in this country,” said Sarah Vogel, who directs the health program at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Reforming a major piece of environmental legislation hasn’t happened in a long time.”

* * *

Three years ago, when I removed my new memory foam mattress from its box, I noticed an acrid smell like what Duntley described. It was something like paint thinner mixed with stale wine, and it lasted for months. I’ve wondered about that smell ever since. So I took a sample of the mattress to Stapleton’s lab. Several days later, I received my report by email and learned that my mattress didn’t have any flame retardants—or at least not the ones that Duke was looking for.

I asked Stapleton what she thought the smell may have been, and she explained that flame retardants are odorless. “What you’re smelling are VOCs,” she said, referring to volatile organic compounds, some of which are harmful gases, emitted from thousands of products, including paint strippers and photocopiers. What kind of VOC, though, she couldn’t say. I knew, like Duntley, that I’d have to spend countless hours to find the answer, if ever I could.

"The burden is pretty much on us to figure out if there’s an issue, which is not true for drugs or pesticides in the United States."

How are any of us supposed to make smart purchases when we’re starved for information, yet fed news about the omnipresence of dangerous chemicals? I posed the question to Brian Zikmund-Fisher, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the way consumers make decisions about their health. He reminded me that we live in a world full of risks. But when we look at one risk in isolation, we tend to overinflate its value. “Since we can’t avoid living in a world that has lots of risk, part of the important question about how to survive is, ‘Am I worrying about the stuff that’s most useful for me to worry about?’”

Some people may opt to buy organic, pesticide-free cookies instead of an apple grown with pesticides, he explained. But that’s a poor choice. “The fruit’s probably going to win that one.” But deciding between apples and cookies is easy, at least it is for me. What about one lotion with triethanolamine and another with polysorbate 60? He agreed that sort of analysis shouldn’t be left to consumers.

“Trying to ask a consumer to be the judge of which one is better is well beyond the level of what anyone can do,” he said. Instead, consumers need government agencies or other testing agencies to help them make these sorts of decisions.

The EPA, in fact, already has a program like this. It isn’t as well known as it could be, but the agency is looking to change that, in part by redesigning the program’s label to be more consumer-friendly, according to Jim Jones, of the EPA. Which is a good start. I’m willing to look at the sugar count on the side of my cereal box. But when it comes to laundry detergent, I’d happily surrender my judgment to an EPA logo. And if Zikmund-Fisher is right, once I stop fretting about the chemicals in my washing machine, I’ll have plenty of room for new anxieties.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.